RadixJournal - August 02, 2023


Barbieland


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

132.81985

Word count

753

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the iconic movie "Barbie" and the role of toxic masculinity in it, and how it relates to our own toxic masculinity. We also talk about feminism and its role in the movie.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I'm curious, in regards to Barbie, where you said earlier you think it's about fearing your own desires, like that's the ultimate horror.
00:00:15.060 I'm curious where you get that read of it.
00:00:17.660 Okay.
00:00:20.420 I'll give you my take on it.
00:00:23.480 With Ken, I think it's more obvious.
00:00:26.860 So, Ken, he feels left out.
00:00:33.400 He's just Ken.
00:00:35.440 And Barbie is the star of the show, and she has the dream house, and he's riding sidecar to Barbie.
00:00:45.080 And then he leaves Barbie land, and he enters the real world.
00:00:50.640 And I guess kind of ironically, he learns about the joys of patriarchy from a library, from criticisms of patriarchy.
00:01:01.660 And he also learns about horses.
00:01:03.100 And then I think in this way that is really realistic, he embraces this kind of dark version of being a man.
00:01:16.180 He becomes Andrew Tate, in effect, but a bit of a lovable Andrew Tate.
00:01:21.040 And it's just bro-ing out, and what is he's like, do you want to be my non-committal, long-distance girlfriend or something?
00:01:30.700 You've got a low commitment.
00:01:33.460 Right.
00:01:34.120 So, it's just basically like, do you want to be my sex friend?
00:01:37.680 You know, friend with Ben.
00:01:38.480 It's just, you're becoming the parody.
00:01:43.240 And I think so many of these kids are like this to stay, because look, everything's screwed up.
00:01:48.700 Everything's really hard.
00:01:50.040 That is true, and I have sympathy.
00:01:52.520 But then your response to that is to almost become the parody of masculinity.
00:01:59.360 And, you know, I have heard of this. 0.99
00:02:01.800 Like, kids in suburban middle school are watching Andrew Tate, and they're going into class and, like, talking to their teacher, like, no, bitch, I don't do no homework. 0.98
00:02:14.580 I'm alpha here. 0.93
00:02:15.640 And, you know, like, the teacher is like, Jimmy, your father is an accountant who's an upstanding member of the community.
00:02:25.340 What has happened?
00:02:27.440 And so, you indulge in that kind of thing.
00:02:30.860 But what is Ken's secret fantasy?
00:02:34.160 What's his secret fantasy?
00:02:36.200 It's actually, he just, he actually loves Barbie.
00:02:40.260 You know?
00:02:40.920 And he becomes, and yeah, he says, I'm Knuff, or I am Ken.
00:02:44.960 Like, he's aware of himself, and so on.
00:02:47.300 But, like, his secret fantasy is what he's fearing.
00:02:51.600 So, he actually wants, he actually loves Barbie and maybe wants to have a mundane relationship with her.
00:02:58.520 But he fears that reality and thus indulges in toxic masculinity of the most, you know, worst but maybe most hilarious kind.
00:03:10.600 So, I think that is kind of an easy one.
00:03:15.440 And I think with Barbie, I would, I mean, I found it interesting that at the end of the day, like, how do I say this?
00:03:29.540 At the end of the day, the men were still fighting over the women.
00:03:32.600 And that was their secret plan to destroy the patriarchy, is to get them fighting each other.
00:03:40.320 But in that sense, they did the most, they created a society that was at its most ancient or most traditional, you could say.
00:03:50.820 Like, you know, like, the rape of the Sabian women, you know, this famous painting and all that kind of stuff.
00:03:58.540 That idea of, like, my tribe, we fight your tribe, we take your tribes, women folk, they become our tribe. 1.00
00:04:09.220 Like, it's the most, like, it's the most basic quality of civilization.
00:04:16.920 Because, I mean, all civilization is based on a lie.
00:04:19.520 It's based on violence.
00:04:20.560 It covers over its own violence.
00:04:23.720 You know, it, you can have a functioning order, but it's ultimately on a grave, a graveyard.
00:04:30.280 Like, it's ultimately on bones.
00:04:32.260 It's ultimately on a crime.
00:04:33.980 Like, even America, we have this, you know, functioning liberal order with citizenship, etc.
00:04:39.360 It's ultimately based on a crime of disobeying our legitimate authorities.
00:04:47.180 And, but you can't do that again.
00:04:49.740 That was the exception that, but then now we can do it.
00:04:53.000 And, and so I feel like maybe, I mean, maybe this is kind of a, well, this is a bit of a subversive reading, but there's, there's the, there's the objective fantasy that I think covers over a deeper fantasy.
00:05:07.440 So there's the objective fantasy of, like, neoliberal feminism, which is that, look, women can be in the Supreme Court, or women can win a Nobel Prize, or women can be doctors, etc.
00:05:18.960 But maybe that's a mask hiding a deeper fantasy, which is we want men fighting over us.
00:05:33.300 Okay, you know, there it is.
00:05:35.040 You can, you can disagree.
00:05:36.220 Yeah, okay, that's, that's an interesting take of the movie.